Friday, 18 July 2014

Hot on the heels of SongKong 2.1 we have SongKong 2.1.1 and this includes an important fix to the artwork finder.

Some Background

Within MusicBrainz different versions of the same release can all be grouped together under a Release Group. For example a CD version and an LP version of the same release would be part of the same release group. Artwork is added at the release level but usually the artwork for all releases within a release group is the same or very similar. Because of this if no artwork can be found for the release that SongKong matched to then SongKong will check releases that are part of the release group and if any artwork found use that instead.

Discogs

Discogs has a similar concept to Release Groups called Masters. Masters also nominate one release as the Main Release which is often
the chronologically earliest. But currently most releases in Dicogs are not linked to Masters so it isn't terribly useful to SongKong at the moment.

Instead we search for simply search for releases with the same artist and release name as our matched release and check the artwork of these releases. At least that is what it was meant do to but it wasn't working, now fixed in SongKong 2.1.1 so the artwork count should continue to rise.

Thursday, 17 July 2014

Last week we released SongKong 2.0 with masses of improvements, unfortunately as is de riguer we also introduced a few bugs and the new When Tracks contain Featured Artists option didn't actually work.

I thought it worth revisiting the featured artists option with some examples.

With the default Add all contributing artists to the artist field
option enabled all artists credited for that track are added to the artist field and all artists credited to the release as a whole are added to the album artist field. So if the songs were matched to this release then we would have:

If a song is equally credited to multiple artists then the
multiple artists will be added to the artist field whatever option is
selected, for example in this release David Bowie and Mick Jagger are equally credited at track and release level so both will always be added to the artist and album artist fields with their join phrase to give us

How do we decide if they are credited equally ?

We look at the join phrase, currently ' & ', ' / ' and ' , ' are treated as equal weighting, in all other cases we consider the first artist to be the main artist. This will probably be expanded for other cases

Friday, 11 July 2014

Self hosted Discogs Server

Pleased to say that SongKong 2.0 is now available. There are a host of improvements in this release but the most significant is that Discogs requests are now served by our own server rather than Discogs itself. The great thing about this is we can customize the search to work exactly how we require it for SongKong rather than working within the constraints of the Discogs provided search, this means we can get better search results and dramatically reduce the number of requests required, so you get better matches faster. We can also move some processing out of the SongKong itself on the server simplifying SongKong code development and reducing CPU usage, giving additional speedups. Our Discogs server will be updated monthly from the latest data provided by Discogs.

Over the next month Jaikoz will be updated to use the self hosted Discogs Server as well.

In the next few months we intend to self-host MusicBrainz data as well, and because MusicBrainz is the primary database used by SongKong this will provide additional improvements in speed and accuracy over and above the Discogs improvements.

Genre Grey Lists

Now SongKong comes with a genre list Grey List that allows you to control what genres are used. Because genres are subjective there is no correct genre for a release but grey lists let you configure
how genres should be processed.

When songs are matched to a Discogs release we check the genres provided by Discogs for that release against the genres listed below, if the Discogs release has multiple genres in this list then we use the genre that comes earliest in this list, so the order of the list is important - if you want to keep them you should put more specialist genres such as 'Power pop' before more general categories such as 'Pop'. If no match is found no genres will be added to songs matched to that release. Having found a match SongKong uses that value if that is the only value on the line, but if there is a ';' and then a second value it will use that second value, this is useful for mapping multiple similar genres to a single genre.

Example:Map three genres to one
All three genres are mapped to a more generic genre when such specific genres are not required

The default list is a list of all the styles and genres currently in the Discogs database with no additional mapping. But this is just the start, more improvements to come with later releases of SongKong.

New Update from Metadata Option

PreviouslySongKong could either rematch all songs or ignore songs already matched but now there is a new option Update Metadata and Filename Only that can be selected from For songs already matched to MusicBrainz on the first tab.

With the default Update Metadata and Filename Only option SongKong will only try to match songs that have not already been matched to MusicBrainz previously, but it will update existing matches with the latest data or make adjustments based on customer preferences. For example if Update Artwork was disabled when originally matched and it is now enabled SongKong will check for artwork without modifying the releases that the songs have already been matched to. Or if you have changed your file rename mask then the new mask will be applied to these already matched songs in additionally to newly matched songs.

If the option is Rematch then SongKong disregards any matching previously done by SongKong or any other MusicBrainz enabled tagger such as Jaikoz and rematches from scratch.

If the option is Ignore then SongKong ignores any songs already matched to MusicBrainz releases and does not process them any further. Note that songs matched to a MusicBrainz recording only or a Discogs release are not ignored.

When Tracks contain Featured Artists Option

This new option is available on the Fix Songs Format tab.

Sometimes tracks are credited to multiple artists, and with the default Add all contributing artists to the artist field option set all these artists will be used in the artist field for this song. But sometimes this can make it difficult to organize your songs because songs by the same main artist can be split up by your music player, if the artist worked with a number of contributing artists. To make things simpler we can ignore these additional artists by selecting the Only use main artist in the artist field and discard other artists option

Alternatively if you don't want the featured artists information to be completely lost they can be added to the title field instead with the Only use main artist in the artist field and add others to the title field. Note if a song is equally credited to multiple artists then the multiple artists will be added to the artist field whatever option is selected, the options only have an effect when there is a main artist and featured or guest artists.